Talking terroir, philsophy and orgasm with Bruno Quenioux

Bruno Quenioux is something of a wine legend in France. He probably has had something to do with the 21^st century wine drinking habits across the Atlantic—even though Americans have never heard of him. (And though he speaks little English.)

For 18 years starting in 1990 Quenioux , 48, began and developed the wine department of Lafayette Gourmet in France’s department store chain, Galeries Lafayette. So what, you might ask, does a store whose image is built around luxury brands and skimpily clad models have to do with terroir?

Well, Quenioux, used much of the shelf space of Lafayette Gourmet to sponsor, support and encourage small, independent, terroir-driven wines that “made his heart beat” years before they became popular in the US or in Paris wine bars for that matter. Quenioux’s orders have been credited with saving more than a few winemakers from ruin.

This spring – two years after leaving Lafayette Gourmet (He says he quit because the company’s expansion into markets such as China and Dubai meant an emphasis on brands over terroir) --Quenioux opened his own wine shop (and internet site) in Paris 5^th arrondisement called Philo Vino (33 rue Claude Bernard +33 (0)1 43 37 13 47, www.philovino.com).

I visited Quenioux recently in the neat storefront shop in the Mouffetard neighborhood where Quenioux has an eclectic selection of (mostly French) wines with a disproportionate emphasis on some of his favorite regions such as the Jura (which produces what he calls “nude wines’”)

A compact man who exudes a perpetual light, Quenioux is as much as an advocate of terroir as there is –- while he criticizes those he calls the “Ayatollahs of natural wine” who have promoted carelessly made no-sulfur wines in which the terroir is smothered by volatile acids, acetates and oxidation.

Speaking of terroir, Quenioux refers to the “mother rock” released into wine by sunlight and roots of the vines :“It’s almost orgasm.”

Quenioux has long been a champion of organic agriculture as it relates to that agricultural alchemy. “For me bio put man in his proper difficulty with the earth. But bio has become a goal in itself…It’s not bio that makes wine. It’s not biodynamics….It’s the winemaker. Agriculture is the earth plus man.”

In recent years Quenioux has concerned himself with expanding wine’s limited and technical vocabulary--giving courses on “unlearning to taste” at the school of Vin et Terroirs in Puligny-Montrachet (Burgundy). “So much of the language of wine tasting is based upon describing everything around the wine—the envelope of fruit and sugar and alcohol—but not it’s essence. ‘

“When you taste old Burgundies for example, there is nothing to describe, but it is good—one doesn’t know why—there is an essence.”

At some seminars Quenioux brings along an Orthodox monk who spent 15 years in the Judean desert. “Fifteeen years in the dessert eating bits of bread,” Quenioux says. “This has given him incredible perception.”